12/29/11

Although I get annoyed by people who blog/tweet/facebook about the food they cook, I wanted to share with you the fact that when I cracked open my egg this morning there was a grotesque, half-formed second egg inside of it!

12/12/11

I was asked by Vol. 1 Brooklyn to write about my favorite Stephen King adaptation and obviously picked The Shining. I wrote a few hundred words about Kubrick's use of Freud's concept of "The Uncanny" as well as his mastery of "terror" over "horror."

The creepiest and most haunting parts of The Shining are moments of pure Radcliffian “terror,” filled with ambiguity and tension. Danny flinching his finger and squeaking in the voice of Tony, “the little boy that lives inside my mouth.” Jack staring eerily into the model hedge maze and seeing, somehow, his wife and child. The ghost butler telling Jack in a slow and deliberate voice, “I corrected them, sir, and when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, Icorrected her.” And the final ambiguous shot of the film, a slow zoom into the image of Jack Torrance smiling in a photograph that was taken decades before he was born.

12/5/11

According to some random application, the above represent the frequency of words in my Facebook status updates for 2k11. I suspect this is more of a random picking of words than a true weighted representation. I doubt I used the word "buffoon" as often as "the." Either way, the words I immediately see--crotchety, crushing, uncaring, existence, despair, surreal, etc.--speak for themselves.